10 things you need to know about – lifelogging

New apps for smartphones, fitness trackers and wearable cameras make up your own digital autobiography. (Thinkstock)

Storing details of everything you do isn't a new concept, but a new breed of apps and gadgets is helping...

1. Lifelogging apps for smartphones

There are several dedicated lifelogging apps for smartphones in 2014, taking advantage of the data and sensors inside your device. Sagastyles itself as a “digital autobiography” pulling information in from various other apps including Facebook, Instagram and various fitness trackers. Narrato describes itself as a digital journal, with a similar focus on importing data from all your apps, while OptimizeMe captures data, then helps you analyse it for correlations between, say, activity levels and stress.

2. Fitness trackers are big

A growing number of people own wearable activity trackers like Nike'sFuelBand, Fitbit or the Jawbone UP, and team these with fitness and diet apps like MyFitnessPal or RunKeeper to monitor their efforts to stay in shape. Some apps – Moves being one example – are extending to other forms of data. Moves doesn't just know how many steps you've taken in a day, but also where you've been – an accidental journal, of sorts.

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3. There is dedicated hardware

A new generation of lifelogging cameras is designed to be worn so they can capture photos throughout the day. Autographer is a £400 camera capable of shooting up to 2,000 shots a day while worn around the neck or clipped onto clothing.

Narrative, meanwhile, costs $279 (but ships worldwide) shooting two photos a minute, and tagging their location using its built-in GPS.

4. Big tech companies are sniffing around

A lot of the apps and gadgets described above came from new startups, but larger consumer electronics firms are beginning to explore lifelogging too. In January, Sony unveiled a device called Core, a wrist-worn activity tracker that connects to a smartphone app calledLifeLogger. The app uses data from Core as well as your photos, music choices and social networking updates, collecting everything together into a daily record.

5. Wearables capture more data

Lifelogging is also likely to play a role in currently hyped categories of wearable gadgets like smart-watches and augmented glasses. Devices like Samsung's Galaxy Gear and Google's Glass are worn throughout the day, with various sensors to capture data – and apps to help make use of them.

6. Social services get logging

Facebook's timeline is now well established, but its annual Year in Review feature aims to show you your “biggest moments” from the last 12 months. Twitter now lets you download your archive of tweets and browse them by month. And Spotify's Year in Review 2013 showed each user what they'd been listening to most.

7. It really isn't a new thing

Microsoft's MyLifeBits project attracted attention in the early 2000s, as researcher Gordon Bell digitally captured a lifetime's photos, messages and work, while colleagues designed software to navigate it. Bell is still going strong, saying in a recent interview that “paper is terrible as it's unsearchable”.

8. Lifelogging gets emotional

Lifelogging software and hardware can tell you what you did and where you did it, but apart from any related status updates, it can't tell you how you were feeling. Researchers have had a crack at that too though: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology had a project called Inside Out: Reflecting on Your Inner State, which matched photos with measurements of the user's skin temperature and conductivity to map happy and stressful moments in the day.

9. Lifelogging can be art

A number of artists have used digital lifelogging as a source for their work. In Alan Kwan's Bad Trip, his wearable video camera captures his daily life, and uploads the data to a 3D virtual world for others to explore. Another artist, Stephen Cartwright, records his latitude, longitude and elevation every hour, and turns the data into artworks.

10. Privacy issues loom large

There are two thorny issues around lifelogging: your privacy, and that of others. The wearable cameras raise questions of permission from the people who are captured, especially if those photos are later published.

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